The House Oversight Committee released a report on Sunday alleging that the leadership of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department fudged the district’s crime numbers to make it appear as if the department was performing better than it actually was.
The findings of the report are based on multiple transcribed interviews with commanders of D.C.’s patrol districts, including one who was placed on leave.
The report suggests that under Chief Pamela Smith, MPD leaders pressured commanders to keep the “public” crime numbers low, even if that meant altering how certain offenses were labeled. D.C. has been a high-crime area for decades, and Smith wanted to make it appear that crime was declining faster.
Commanders told investigators that they were “not only pressured, but also instructed, to lower crime classifications to lesser intermediate offenses in such a way that those offenses would not be included in the DCR reported to the public.”
One leader said the objective was “to have the lowest crime possible to report out to the mayor and to the city,” instead of actually working to lower crime rates.
My faith in government statistics has been shaken to the core. Massive fraud by DC police https://t.co/Jpaql2PC9f
— James Bovard (@JimBovard) December 12, 2025
The commanders described feeling that their “positions and livelihoods were dependent on reporting low crime numbers,” which was the result of “the manifestation of a culture of fear, intimidation, threats, and retaliation by Chief Smith,” according to the House Oversight Committee.
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Another commander said daily crime briefings were “really an atonement for our sins,” in which people were “humiliated publicly by our chief and assistant chiefs” if the numbers were not to the chief’s liking. One leader indicated that if crime rates rose, “there’s a chance to be transferred or moved out of the role that you’re in,” and that “everyone” who attended the meetings was fearful.
Some of the interviewees characterized the MPD’s culture as “toxic.” One of them told investigators they planned to leave the department because of “a toxic executive staff.”
As an example of how MPD cooked its numbers, a commander said he was instructed to change an “assault with a dangerous weapon” shooting where nobody was hit into “an endangerment with a firearm.” This category of crime does not appear in public reports, which means MPD can conceal various offenses from the public.
Another commander said many burglaries were recategorized as unlawful entry plus theft because this is also left out of the public report. He said a typical case “would read like a burglary…But the proper charge would be burglary; unlawful entry doesn't meet the DCR status for burglary. So maybe my burglaries are down now, even though I had a ton of unlawful entries.”
Over the past five years, crime in the district has remained high. But there have been recent drops. In 2024, the violent crime rate was about 1,006 per 100,000 residents, and the property crime rate was about 3,693 per 100,000. However, this represented a 35 percent decline from 2023.
But if the MPD has been artificially deflating the numbers and concealing violent and property offenses, it is impossible to know how much crime has been dropping in D.C. — if it has been dropping at all.
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